


Metaphorical Ants

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Aziraphale is not drunk enough for this, Crowley has many feelings, Drunkenness, M/M, Oblivious Aziraphale (Good Omens), Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-16 04:28:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20195878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: 'Ontologically and theologically speaking, demons do not feel love. God is love, thus by being cast out of Her favour that virtue was cast out of them. Asking a demon to so much as describe love is like asking an ant to describe gravity, presuming ants can comprehend anti-gravity into the bargain or at least extended metaphors.(Of course, if we could ask ants their position on physics, the world might well be a better place. It would certainly contain more leaves.)'Crowley is drunk and in love with a lot of things. Aziraphale would prefer not to listen to this.





	Metaphorical Ants

Ontologically and theologically speaking, demons do not feel love. God is love, thus by being cast out of Her favour that virtue was cast out of them. Asking a demon to so much as describe love is like asking an ant to describe gravity, presuming ants can comprehend anti-gravity into the bargain or at least extended metaphors.

(Of course, if we could ask ants their position on physics, the world might well be a better place. It would certainly contain more leaves.)

The point is that while all demons would not deny their ability to feel love, that’s because they would be at best confused and at worse egregiously offended, 'deny' rather implying that there is something to ignore. That part of them was hollowed out with a cosmic divine ice cream scoop, and filled up with all the vices of the void, the silky caramel filling of evil, as it were. That's all there is to it.

That said, the demon Crowley, not largely considered a great demon as far as these things went, has a tendency to forget certain things when sufficiently inebriated. He’ll forget some of the fancier French-rooted words in the English language; he fails to recall that human vessels aren’t supposed to hiss; and some of the most fundamental and certainly relevant theological matters of his very existence just slip his mind.

"I love you," he announces to the ground. The ground is extremely flattered by this, but feels that they should just stay friends. "You with your...groundiness. You stay down there. I love you for that." Feeling increasingly awkward, the ground stays put, for fear that any extra effort will entangle the two of them in a series of misunderstandings.

"And you!" Crowley points up in the air, where a parakeet has failed to shoot past fast enough to avoid such demonic blessings. "Fast bugger! Annoying...sounds! I love you!"

Aziraphale clears his throat behind him. "My dear, I think perhaps we should – "

"Big world!" Crowley shouts intelligently and full of verbal audacity, every inch the mind which had inspired Shakespeare, flirted with Shelley (times two), and personally called Scott an over-romantic piss brick. "So much _stuff_. Love all of it, that's me."

It hadn't even been that nice a red, Aziraphale thinks mournfully. You couldn't even give it a name. Any label slinked (slank?) out of your mind in shame, merely 'red wine', its only possible aspiration 'house red'. No wonder Crowley had been able to miracle up so much of it. Nobody would ever notice its passing.

"There!" Crowley throws himself to the ground, wriggling in a manner which initially makes Aziraphale assume he's forgotten to shapeshift. That happens sometimes. Very disconcerting for customers when a snake starts to speak, and perhaps rather useful when earlier closing hours seemed appropriate, on a feast day or somesuch. "Useless worm. Alive though, and I love it." He pokes at the singled-out worm. "You go feed birds, wormy. Do your thing. Get raptured."

Usually Aziraphale would leave him to it – that or joined him in a drunken daze of love for the universe, there really is nothing quite like lying on the earth and feeling all the filters between himself and the cosmos fall down – but on this occasion he is quite unfairly sober. There are few things more miserable than being sober amongst drunk people, particularly when said drunk people are the people you're supposed to be spending time with, and especially when every drunken utterance seems to be making you somehow impossibly more sober than ever before. At the present rate Aziraphale would probably require at least ten bottles of vodka and a fruity cocktail with a minimum of three umbrellas just to feel clearheaded. Angels can get far more drunk than humans, and that same logic applies to the exact opposite as well. (Take Sandalphon, for example. Or Michael. Take any of the archangels, and if you didn't bring them back, all the better for it.)

Nothing sobers anyone up quite as much as hearing the being you love most in the world declare his love for everything except you.

"You!" Left unattended by the intervention of an inner monologue, Crowley has spotted a human stranger ahead of them on the path. Said human, in an unpromising display of their intellect, points at themselves in question. "Yes, you! I love you!"

The human appears somewhat befuddled by this revelation. Aziraphale does not assume his natural form, for the simple reason that then demonic wiles could be said to have won due to the human's brain melting out of their ears. He might, however, project a slight sense of eyes and wheels – nothing much in the great scheme of things, ‘scheme’ feeling a more operative word by the day – and watches the human flee with satisfaction. "Don't you think we should be heading home now?"

Crowley scoffs a truly drunken scoff, the likes of which scoffs were made for. All scoffs aspire to be this, the quintessential and definitive scoff. "Everything's out here, angel."

"Geographically that isn't true." There is a bed, for starters. Also coffee, tea, and the complete works of Jeffrey Archer, the last of which have never failed to leave Crowley in a stupor.

"But _everything_!" Crowley spins in a circle, a rather ambitious undertaking for a being who struggles with 'limbs' at the best of times. "Whole bloody universe! And I love all of it! Look!" Rather unexpectedly, he seizes not Aziraphale's hands (as the angel had been preparing himself for with appropriate diligence and self-sacrifice) but rather his head and directs it enthusiastically at the sky. "Look at that! Whole sky of stars, still there. There," he points, "made that one myself, and that. Lovely work. Don't get those sorts of stars these days, you know. Poured everything into them."

Crowley’s finger on this occasion is wavering far too much for even angelic sight to identify its exact target. That hardly matters though: since the Apocalypse That Couldn’t, the question of the works of Crowley which had almost been condemned by the incompetence of chattering nuns (not at chattering, Crowley seems quite clear on that point) has come up surprisingly often. Apparently in the aftermath of the shock and confusion Crowley’s whirling mind has elected to settle upon taking personal offence – or, given his natural state, less settling and more burrowing deep inside. The matter of Falling remains very much off limits, but Before has lifted some of its stricter legislation in the name of letting Crowley reel off a list of works which has frankly left Aziraphale, well, reeling, in a cosmic sense. (Temporally angels all consist of the same age, having been in existence before the quite literal beginning of time. Listening to Crowley’s accounts of some rather more foundational universal works, Aziraphale finds himself repeatedly reflecting that this is just as well, or else he might spend many a night contemplating whether their stock could engage in ‘cradle-snatching’.)

All of this, the speculation and recollection and brackets, pass through Aziraphale’s mind as he simultaneously admires the way Crowley’s fingers are very long and arguably perfect (arguing in the philosophical sense, where you both assumed an ultimate and then wrote long bitchy dialogues in Greek about how the other is wrong). The angelic mind is capable of processing infinity, even if a great many angels prefer instead infinite process, and Aziraphale is the great product tester of his species/plane/choir/side [delete as applicable].

“Alpha Centauri!” Crowley says lovingly, ie. extremely loudly straight into Aziraphale’s ear. “_Beautiful_ work, if I do say so myself, which I do, because I heard myself.” He nods with pride, the way only a purveyor of sin can, as Aziraphale tries to subtly repair his cochlea (mind out of the gutter, dear reader, and learn to Google). “Love it. Love it _so_ much.” He hits his chest where human scientists have deemed the heart to reside, with a level of force which would make most of those human scientists swoon. (Not that it’s all that hard, human scientists just didn’t seem to be a hardy folk in the face of physical contact in Aziraphale’s experience, having saved all their hardiness for radiation poisoning.) “Right there.”

Love does not reside in the heart. It certainly does not reside in the heart of a demonic corporeal vessel. However, Crowley has been responsible for any number of movements in romantic poetry, only some of which he’s admitted to in his paperwork, and that sort of thing tends to lodge down deep. After all, much like humans, Crowley seems very concerned with finding words for things which transcend human language.

(Once, while Crowley was sleeping, Aziraphale had spoken of love in the tongue of those beings which did not communicate with tongues. It melted several items of furniture and caused Crowley’s plants to achieve self-actualisation, and it took some extremely immoderate miracle expenditure to try to cover up the mess. Crowley still occasionally takes a very suspicious sniff in the middle of his foyer, subtly checking the bottom of his shoes and the underside of his sleeves.)

“Ow.” Even in his current state, Crowley can apparently comprehend that he is supposed to feel pain when punching himself in the chest. That is what extensive practice and hard work gets you.

Aziraphale pats Crowley on the shoulder and does not think about at least forty different variations of love. Unfortunately that still leaves far too many and he can’t help noticing the way Crowley squirms. You would recognise the movement as someone covered in ants, if that person was more of a personification of snakehood than the average human. (And yes, that does means some humans are fairly close to a personification of snakehood, because in this work we employ the mean as our preferred form of calculating the average.) Very loving ants, engaged in a debate on theoretical physics. In this new post-Antichrist world, metaphors had a power all their own. 

Crowley looks up at his stars (not the other, inferior ones) and blinks. Aziraphale can’t physically observe this, his vessel’s eyes annoyingly confounded by darkened lenses, but that rather implies that he doesn’t constantly gaze on Crowley in every way of which he is capable. 

“I love you,” Crowley says, still seized in the unyielding grip of bedrunken enchanted ridiculous honesty.

“They’re very nice stars,” Aziraphale tells him.

The skin around Crowley’s glasses scrunches up into old parchment. A gust of wind, laden with Thames chill and Thames stench, whistles suddenly loud into human ears which adjust so slowly.

“They are, aren’t they,” Crowley says, and not only is he quiet, but he sounds quite sober.


End file.
